nature, and his rigid incapacity for dealing with the grandeurs of the
human spirit, with religion, with poetry, or even with science, when it
rose above the mercenary practical, is absolutely appalling. His own
_yahoo_ is not a more abominable one-sided degradation of humanity,
than is he himself under this aspect. And, perhaps, it places this
incapacity of his in its strongest light, when we recur to the fact of his
_astonishment_ at a religious princess refusing to confer a bishoprick
upon one that had treated the Trinity, and all the profoundest mysteries
of Christianity, not with mere scepticism, or casual sneer, but with set
pompous merriment and farcical buffoonery. This dignitary of the church,
Dean of the most conspicuous cathedral in Ireland, had, in full
canonicals, made himself into a regular mountebank, for the sake of giving
fuller effect, by the force of contrast, to the silliest of jests directed
against all that was most inalienable from Christianity. Ridiculing such
things, could he, in any just sense, be thought a Christian? But, as
Schlosser justly remarks, even ridiculing the peculiarities of Luther and
Calvin as he _did_ ridicule them, Swift could not be thought other
than constitutionally incapable of religion. Even a Pagan philosopher, if
made to understand the case, would be incapable of scoffing at any
_form_, natural or casual, simple or distorted, which might be
assumed by the most solemn of problems--problems that rest with the weight
of worlds upon the human spirit--

'Fix'd fate, free-will, fore-knowledge absolute.'

the destiny of man, or the relations of man to God. Anger, therefore,
Swift _might_ feel, and he felt it [7] to the end of his most wretched
life; but what reasonable ground had a man of sense for _astonishment_--
that a princess, who (according to her knowledge) was sincerely pious,
should decline to place such a man upon an Episcopal throne? This argues,